In-Person Events Are Back – the Real Opportunity Is Below Ticketing

01 /The Concept

Posh has raised $66.8 million and counting – with rounds arriving on a remarkably consistent schedule, each larger than the last. In 2022, the company raised $350K; spring 2023 brought $3.5 million; late 2023 added another $4 million; summer 2024 saw $22 million; and just before the new year, $35.8 million closed.

Posh is an app where users can find interesting local offline events and buy tickets.

The event categories are wide: concerts, club nights, DJ sets, watching sports at a bar, yoga and fitness classes, cooking schools, gallery openings, performances, and much more.

Anyone can create an event in under a minute – just add a name, location, description, and a cover photo. Events can be ticketed and open to all, or free and invite-only, with invitations sent directly to other app users.

For paid events, organizers can sell tickets both through Posh and through their own channels – but the startup claims that 53% of tickets for events on the platform are sold through Posh and its communications.

Organizers get real-time sales dashboards and receive daily payouts from Posh for tickets sold.

Last year, Posh added at-the-door ticket sales – no payment terminals required, since purchases happen directly in the app.

To drive attendance, organizers can offer referral rewards: when existing attendees bring in new ticket buyers, the organizer earns additional revenue. Posh claims this mechanism can generate up to $35,000 in additional revenue per event.

Organizers also receive detailed audience analytics, drawn from attendee app profiles, including rich demographic and behavioral data – useful for positioning future events more precisely.

Posh charges organizers 10% of ticket revenue plus $0.99 per ticket. Free events cost nothing – but organizers who run a successful free event tend to come back for paid ones.

Posh now has 8 million users, each of whom can be both an attendee and an organizer.

02 /Why It Matters

Startuping [covered Posh previously](/review/pojdjom-potusuemsja) when it raised its last round in summer 2024. What's changed since then?

Two months ago, Posh started building a vendor ecosystem for event organizers – a curated directory of vetted service providers: photographers, videographers, and designers, with DJs, security staff, catering, and other creative and logistics roles to follow. The goal is to eliminate the coordination hassle of organizing events so that having a good idea is enough – all the people needed to execute it are in one place.

Less friction for organizers means more events. More events means more attendees and more app users. More users means more organizers. A self-reinforcing loop.

Around the same time, Posh added group features: spaces where organizers and attendees can interact before and after events. This gives organizers a way to build a following – essentially a subscriber base from which they can recruit audiences for their next events. Posh is quietly beginning to function as a social network organized around live experiences.

Eight months ago, Posh added recurring event support – a single page and a single group for a series that repeats on a schedule, whether that's a weekly Friday night event, a monthly themed party, or weekend cooking classes.

Grouping repeating events simplifies attendee loyalty and makes it easier for regulars not to lose track of things they enjoy. The natural next step – which feels almost inevitable – is adding subscription pricing for recurring events, where a monthly pass costs less than buying individual tickets. That would let offline event organizers monetize on the subscription model that has already become standard in digital media. Which would actually be quite interesting.

The events app category is getting crowded. Posh is arguably the most well-funded and user-favored player in it, but a few comparisons are worth noting.

Pie ([related review](/review/uber-dlja-druzhby)) raised $13.5 million for a similar app – including $2 million after its review coverage. It was founded by the creator of the Bonobos clothing brand, sold to Walmart in 2017 for $310 million.

Plots ([related review](/review/prostoj-lozung-nabirajushhego-silu-trenda)) raised $3.5 million, with $2.5 million of that coming last year.

03 /Opportunities

Posh articulated the underlying driver on the first slide of its previous fundraising deck: "Human connection is lost. Gen Z is the loneliest generation in history."

The internet gave everyone access to an endless stream of contacts and followers, and Gen Z grew up entirely inside it. You can be always-on, always communicating – and still feel profoundly isolated. Because digital interaction is not the same as spending real time with people in the same physical space – the kind of time where you make actual friends, not just connections, and maintain the kind of relationships that don't exist on a screen.

The macro trend: the "internet generation" is discovering a genuine desire for offline life. To act on that desire, people need more reasons to get out – events nearby, happening soon, that they can join without much planning.

The product direction: build the app that surfaces those reasons.

But the most important lever – and what Posh is actively investing in – is removing friction for potential organizers. The supply of events constrains everything else. Bring in the mechanisms that already work in digital – social graphs, subscriptions, communities – and apply them to offline life, and you start to see why this category is getting serious investment attention.

On the theme of bridging online audiences to offline life, River ([related review](/review/horoshij-sposob-otobrat-1-trillion)) is worth mentioning. The startup raised $1.7 million for a platform that helps online creators and community organizers bring their followers together in person – through dinners, workshops, seminars, or conferences – wherever in the world a local follower is willing to host. It's a monetization and community-building tool for anyone with an online audience.

Event organizing has been around forever. But it's getting a second wind right now – because people have had their fill of the internet and want back into the real world.

What opportunity can you give them to get there?